In saying which, Mrs. Wadman edged herself close in beside my Uncle Toby, and squeezing herself down upon the corner of his bench, she gave him an opportunity of doing it without rising up "Do look into it!" said she.
Honest soul! Thou wast ever being adjured to "look into" things, all sorts of things, from Widow's eyes to matters of far wider scope, and infinitely less simplicity and clarity. And thou didst look into it with as much innocency and simple good-will as ever child looked into a raree show-box.
If a man will be prying, of his own accord, into things of such ticklish and troublesome, not to say perilous nature—I've nothing to say to it.
My Uncle Toby never did, being naturally of an unobservant and easy-going nature; and I will answer for him, that he would have sat quietly in his seat in that Sentry Box or the House from February to September (which you know were his favourite months for serious Session) with an eye as fine and soft as the Thracian Rhodope's, or as threatening and commanding as that of Mars—even a hectoring fiery thrasonic Hibernian Mars—himself, without being able to tell whether it was a black or a blue one, or even a Green or a Yellow.
The difficulty was to get my Uncle Toby to look into things at all.
'Tis surmounted. And——
I see him yonder, with his pipe pendulous in his hand, and the ashes falling out of it, looking, and looking, then rubbing his eyes and looking again, with twice the good-nature that ever Galileo looked for a spot in the sun.
In vain! For by all the powers which animate the organ, Widow Wadman's left eye shines this moment as lucid as her right. 'Tis true the unfortunate, and something irate lady—and what lady would not be irate at the charge of having aught of Green in her eye?—hath with her cambric handkerchief rubbed the sinister orb into a state of roseate irritation—externally—but there is neither mote, nor sand, nor dust, nor chaff, nor speck, nor fly,—Green or otherwise—nor particle of solid opaque matter floating in it. 'Tis, indeed, pure optic illusion on the Widow's part, illusion born, perchance, partly of fear, partly of pique. There is nothing, my dear paternal Uncle, but one lambent, feverish fire, deliciously attractive, even in its angry heat, fascinating even whilst phlogistic, shooting out from every part of it, in all directions, into thine——
——If thou lookest, Uncle Toby, in search of this imaginary mote one moment longer—thou art undone.
An eye is, for all the world, exactly like a cannon in this respect; that it is not so much the eye or the cannon, in themselves, as it is the carriage of the eye—and the carriage of the cannon, by which both the one and the other are enabled to do so much execution. The Widow's eye, owing mainly to the militant and menacing carriage thereof, looked as formidable as a whole park of artillery, ranged up to defend a final fortification, or, as it might be, Last Ditch of defence. Whether it were exactly as fierce or formidable as it seemed—well, that was a question which my Uncle Toby had not yet fully "looked into"—as he was now doing into Widow Wadman's left eye.